So most of you are probably already aware of the term “Valve Time”, but for the uninitiated, Valve Time works like this. Valve Software will say that they’re going to release a thing by a certain date. That date comes and goes with no word. Maybe three months or so later they release the thing, but the thing is beautiful, complete, and for the most part, glitch free.

By contrast, there’s Overkill Time. Which is not really a thing, just something I’ve made up.

Overkill doesn’t really do release dates. There have been some vague ones. May for the Alesso Heist. Next Fall for sound updates. For the most part, they seem to prefer the surprise element of springing updates on players. I assume the surprise of it is what they like about not having a public production schedule because Overkill actually doesn’t take advantage of the opening they give themselves. Even without needing to meet a deadline, they publish glitchy, broken, ugly shit.

During her dinner with Almir Listo, my friend confirmed what I had always suspected about his over-reliance on this emoticon. It’s a canned response he developed to questions he’s not at liberty to answer. It’s meant to be cheeky and coy, to offset the fact that you’re not getting a straight answer, but it just reads as evasive and smarmy since he uses it so often.

Look, anyone worth a damn knows that sometimes you just can’t answer certain questions when it comes to game development. It’s usually because you don’t want to give away surprises before release date. Sometimes, it’s because you’re testing the feasibility of a feature out and you don’t want to get people’s hopes up only to disappoint them later. I will hand it to Almir that he does know when to keep things under his hat, as opposed to Goldfarb who made promises early on that Overkill is still being asked about three years later (but that’s another post).

But 😉 isn’t just about questions Almir can’t answer. It’s become emblematic of a larger problem with his public presentation.

So I noted yesterday that when I began my journal with its singular post, it received a few hits from a user in Sweden who then proceeded to run a search on the rest of my site for “almir listo”. I have a feeling that Google Alerts has something to do with this curious set of coincidences, and so I’ve chosen to write this introduction. It is my guess that this series is what that person was looking for and it didn’t come up because I just haven’t mentioned Almir specifically yet.

I did say in that chat that I was going to write a piece on the Infamy 2.0 reddit AMA and how it could have been handled better. I do still plan to address certain things I saw happening in that thread. As I kept trying to get out everything I wanted to say, however, I realized that even trying to contain myself to just that one PR event was a gargantuan task. There was just no way that I could even begin to talk about how things could be so much better without being painfully tl;dr.

But moreover, as I dug deeper into Almir’s answers, the more I came to feel that trying to speak to him personally, as per an open letter format like I originally tried, was a futile task.